12.12.2008

Comparison: BPEL 1.1 vs BPEL 2.0

The BPEL 2.0 specification was released in April 2007. Now 1.5 years later only a few BPEL engines have implemented this standard. Oracle had released a white paper about BPEL 2.0 and future SOA Suite releases in October 2006. Now we have still to wait for 11g to get BPEL 2.0, but is this really a problem? What is the difference between BPEL 1.1 and 2.0 or what is the difference between Oracle's BPEL PM and BPEL 2.0?

In Oracle's BPEL PM there is already the new XPath extension built in and XSLTs can be used via <transform>. The Syntax makeovers are not really new functionality. Rewriting forEach and repeatUntil into while is possible, but sometimes painful and the enriched fault handling will make some workflows more readable.So it will be nice to get BPEL 2.0 but it is no major problem to stay with BPEL 1.1 and the Oracle specific enhancements....